The Last Kingdom

by Bernard Cornwell

  The buildings of the old city were extraordinary. They were Roman work, high and stout, and even though their walls were broken and their roofs had fallen in they still astonished. Some were three or even four floors high and we chased one another up and down their abandoned stairways. Few English folk lived here, though many Danes were now occupying the houses as the army assembled. Brida said that sensible people would not live in a Roman town because of the ghosts that haunted the old buildings, and maybe she was right, though I had seen no ghosts in Eoferwic, but her mention of specters made us all nervous as we peered down a flight of steps into a dark, pillared cellar.

  We stayed in Lundene for weeks and even when Halfdan’s army reached us we did not move west. Mounted bands did ride out to forage, but the Great Army still gathered and some men grumbled we were waiting too long, that the West Saxons were being given precious time to ready themselves, but Halfdan insisted on lingering. The West Saxons sometimes rode close to the city, and twice there were fights between our horsemen and their horsemen, but after a while, as Yule approached, the West Saxons must have decided we would do nothing till winter’s end and their patrols stopped coming close to the city.

  “We’re not waiting for spring,” Ragnar told me, “but for deep winter.”

  “Why?”

  “Because no army marches in winter,” he said wolfishly, “so the West Saxons will all be at home, sitting around their fires and praying to their feeble god. By spring, Uhtred, all England will be ours.”

  We all worked that early winter. I hauled firewood, and when I was not hauling logs from the wooded hills north of the city, I was learning the skills of the sword. Ragnar had asked Toki, his new shipmaster, to be my teacher and he was a good one. He watched me rehearse the basic cuts, then told me to forget them. “In a shield wall,” he said, “it’s savagery that wins. Skill helps, and cunning is good, but savagery wins. Get one of these.” He held out a saxe with a thick blade, much thicker than my old saxe. I despised the saxe for it was much shorter than Serpent-Breath and far less beautiful, but Toki wore one beside his proper sword, and he persuaded me that in the shield wall the short, stout blade was better. “You’ve no room to swing or hack in a shield wall,” he said, “but you can thrust, and a short blade uses less room in a crowded fight. Crouch and stab, bring it up into their groins.” He made Brida hold a shield and pretend to be the enemy, and then, with me on his left, he cut at her from above and she instinctively raised the shield. “Stop!” he said, and she froze into stillness. “See?” he told me, pointing at the raised shield. “Your partner makes the enemy raise their shield, then you can slice into their groin.” He taught me a dozen other moves, and I practiced because I liked it and the more I practiced the more muscle I grew and the more skillful I became.

  We usually practiced in the Roman arena. That is what Toki called it, the arena, though what the word meant neither he nor I had any idea, but it was, in a place of extraordinary things, astonishing. Imagine an open space as large as a field surrounded by a great circle of tiered stone where weeds now grew from the crumbling mortar. The Mercians, I later learned, had held their folkmoots here, but Toki said the Romans had used it for displays of fighting in which men died. Maybe that was another of his fantastic stories, but the arena was huge, unimaginably huge, a thing of mystery, the work of giants, dwarfing us, so big that all the Great Army could have collected inside and there would still have been room for two more armies just as big on the tiered seats.

  Yule came, and the winter feast was held and the army vomited in the streets and still we did not march, but shortly afterward the leaders of the Great Army met in the palace next to the arena. Brida and I, as usual, were required to be Ravn’s eyes and he, as usual, told us what we were seeing.

  The meeting was held in the church of the palace, a Roman building with a roof shaped like a half barrel on which the moon and stars were painted, though the blue and golden paint was peeling and discolored now. A great fire had been lit in the center of the church and it was filling the high roof with swirling smoke. Halfdan presided from the altar, and around him were the chief earls. One was an ugly man with a blunt face, a big brown beard, and a finger missing from his left hand. “That is Bagseg,” Ravn told us, “and he calls himself a king, though he’s no better than anyone else.” Bagseg, it seemed, had come from Denmark in the summer, bringing eighteen ships and nearly six hundred men. Next to him was a tall, gloomy man with white hair and a twitching face. “Earl Sidroc,” Ravn told us, “and his son must be with him?”

  “Thin man,” Brida said, “with a dripping nose.”

  “Earl Sidroc the Younger. He’s always sniffing. My son is there?”

  “Yes,” I said, “next to a very fat man who keeps whispering to him and grinning.”

  “Harald!” Ravn said. “I wondered if he would turn up. He’s another king.”

  “Really?” Brida asked.

  “Well, he calls himself king, and he certainly rules over a few muddy fields and a herd of smelly pigs.”

  All those men had come from Denmark, and there were others besides. Earl Fraena had brought men from Ireland, and Earl Osbern who had provided the garrison for Lundene while the army gathered, and together these kings and earls had assembled well over two thousand men.

  Osbern and Sidroc proposed crossing the river and striking directly south. This, they argued, would cut Wessex in two and the eastern part, which used to be the kingdom of Kent, could then be taken quickly. “There has to be much treasure in Contwaraburg,” Sidroc insisted. “It’s the central shrine of their religion.”

  “And while we march on their shrine,” Ragnar said, “they will come up behind us. Their power is not in the east, but in the west. Defeat the west and all Wessex falls. We can take Contwaraburg once we’ve beaten the west.”

  This was the argument. Either take the easy part of Wessex or else attack their major strongholds that lay to the west, and two merchants were asked to speak. Both men were Danes who had been trading in Readingum only two weeks before. Readingum lay a few miles upriver and was on the edge of Wessex, and they claimed to have heard that King Æthelred and his brother, Alfred, were gathering the shire forces from the west and the two merchants reckoned the enemy army would number at least three thousand.

  “Of whom only three hundred will be proper fighting men,” Halfdan interjected sarcastically, and was rewarded by the sound of men banging swords or spears against their shields. It was while this noise echoed under the church’s barrel roof that a new group of warriors entered, led by a very tall and very burly man in a black tunic. He looked formidable, clean shaven, angry, and very rich for his black cloak had an enormous brooch of amber mounted in gold, his arms were heavy with golden rings, and he wore a golden hammer on a thick golden chain about his neck. The warriors made way for him, his arrival causing silence among the crowd nearest to him, and the silence spread as he walked up the church until the mood, which had been of celebration, suddenly seemed wary.

  “Who is it?” Ravn whispered to me.

  “Very tall,” I said, “many arm rings.”

  “Gloomy,” Brida put in, “dressed in black.”

  “Ah! The earl Guthrum,” Ravn said.

  “Guthrum?”

  “Guthrum the Unlucky,” Ravn said.

  “With all those arm rings?”

  “You could give Guthrum the world,” Ravn said, “and he would still believe you had cheated him.”

  “He has a bone hanging in his hair,” Brida said.

  “You must ask him about that,” Ravn said, evidently amused, but he would say no more about the bone, which was a human rib and tipped with gold.

  I learned Guthrum the Unlucky was an earl from Denmark who had been wintering at Beamfleot, a place that lay a good distance east of Lundene on the northern side of the Temes estuary, and once he had greeted the men bunched about the altar, he announced that he had brought fourteen ships upriver. No one applauded. Guthrum, who had the sad
dest, sourest face I had ever seen, stared at the assembly like a man standing trial and expecting a dire verdict. “We had decided,” Ragnar broke the uncomfortable silence, “to go west.” No such decision had been made, but nor did anyone contradict Ragnar. “Those ships that are already through the bridge,” Ragnar went on, “will take their crews upstream and the rest of the army will march on foot or horseback.”

  “My ships must go upstream,” Guthrum said.

  “They are through the bridge?”

  “They will still go upstream,” Guthrum insisted, thus letting us know that his fleet was below the bridge.

  “It would be better,” Ragnar said, “if we went tomorrow.” In the last few days the whole of the Great Army had assembled in Lundene, marching in from the settlements east and north where some had been quartered, and the longer we waited, the more of the precious food supply would be consumed.

  “My ships go upstream,” Guthrum said flatly.

  “He’s worried,” Ravn whispered to me, “that he can’t carry away the plunder on horseback. He wants his ships so he can fill them with treasure.”

  “Why let him come?” I asked. It was plain no one liked Earl Guthrum, and his arrival seemed as unwelcome as it was inconvenient, but Ravn just shrugged the question off. Guthrum, it seemed, was here, and if he was here he must take part. That still seems incomprehensible to me, just as I still did not understand why Ivar and Ubba were not joining the attack on Wessex. It was true that both men were rich and scarcely needed more riches, but for years they had talked of conquering the West Saxons and now both had simply turned away. Guthrum did not need land or wealth either, but he thought he did, so he came. That was the Danish way. Men served in a campaign if they wished, or else they stayed home, and there was no single authority among the Danes. Halfdan was the Great Army’s ostensible leader, but he did not frighten men as his two older brothers did and so he could do nothing without the agreement of the other chieftains. An army, I learned in time, needs a head. It needs one man to lead it, but give an army two leaders and you halve its strength.

  It took two days to get Guthrum’s ships past the bridge. They were beautiful things, those ships, larger than most Danish boats, and each decorated at prow and stern with black-painted serpent heads. His men, and there were many of them, all wore black. Even their shields were painted black, and while I thought Guthrum to be one of the most miserable men I had ever seen, I had to confess his troops were impressive. We might have lost two days, but we had gained the black warriors.

  And what was there to fear? The Great Army had gathered, it was midwinter when no one fought so the enemy should not be expecting us, and that enemy was led by a king and a prince more interested in prayer than in fighting. All Wessex lay before us and common report said that Wessex was as rich a country as any in all the world, rivaling Frankia for its treasures, and inhabited by monks and nuns whose houses were stuffed with gold, spilling over with silver, and ripe for slaughter. We would all be rich.

  So we went to war.

  Ships on the winter Temes. Ships sliding past brittle reeds and leafless willows and bare alders. Wet oar blades shining in the pale sunlight. The prows of our ships bore their beasts to quell the spirits of the land we invaded, and it was good land with rich fields, though all were deserted. There was almost a celebratory air to that brief voyage, a celebration unspoiled by the presence of Guthrum’s dark ships. Men oar-walked, the same feat I had watched Ragnar perform on that far-off day when his three ships had appeared off Bebbanburg. I tried it myself and raised a huge cheer when I fell in. It looked easy to run along the oar bank, leaping from shaft to shaft, but a rower only had to twitch an oar to cause a man to slip and the river water was bitterly cold so that Ragnar made me strip off my wet clothes and wear his bearskin cloak until I was warm. Men sang, the ships forged against the current, the far hills to the north and south slowly closed on the river’s banks and, as evening came, we saw the first horsemen on the southern skyline. Watching us.

  We reached Readingum at dusk. Each of Ragnar’s three ships was loaded with spades, many of them forged by Ealdwulf, and our first task was to start making a wall. As more ships came, more men helped, and by nightfall our camp was protected by a long, straggling earth wall that would have been hardly any obstacle to an attacking force for it was merely a low mound that was easy to cross, but no one did come and assault us, and no Wessex army appeared the next morning and so we were free to make the wall higher and more formidable.

  Readingum was built where the river Kenet flows into the Temes, and so our wall was built between the two rivers. It enclosed the small town that had been abandoned by its inhabitants and provided shelter for most of the ships’ crews. The land army was still out of sight for they had marched along the north bank of the Temes, in Mercian territory, and were seeking a ford, which they found further upstream, so that our wall was virtually finished by the time they marched in. At first we thought it was the West Saxon army coming, but it was Halfdan’s men, marching out of enemy territory they had found deserted.

  The wall was high now and, because there were deep woods to the south, we had cut trees to make a palisade along its whole length that was about eight hundred paces. In front of the wall we dug a ditch that flooded when we broke through the two rivers’ banks, and across the ditch we were making four bridges guarded by wooden forts. This was our base. From here we could march deep into Wessex, and we needed to for, with so many men and now horses inside the wall, there was a risk of hunger unless we found supplies of grain, hay, and cattle. We had brought barrels of ale and a large amount of flour, salt meat, and dried fish in the ships, but it was astonishing how fast those great heaps diminished.

  The poets, when they speak of war, talk of the shield wall, they talk of the spears and arrows flying, of the blade beating on the shield, of the heroes who fall and the spoils of the victors, but I was to discover that war was really about food. About feeding men and horses. About finding food. The army that eats wins. And, if you keep horses in a fortress, it is about shoveling dung. Just two days after the land army came to Readingum, we were short of food and the two Sidrocs, father and son, led a large force west into enemy territory to find stores of food for men and horses, and instead they found the fyrd of Berrocscire.

  We learned later that the whole idea of attacking in winter was no surprise to the West Saxons after all. The Danes were good at spying, their merchants exploring the places the warriors would go, but the West Saxons had their own men in Lundene and they knew how many men we were, and when we would march, and they had assembled an army to meet us. They had also sought help from the men of southern Mercia, where Danish rule was lightest, and Berrocscire lay immediately north of the West Saxon border and the men of Berrocscire had crossed the river to help their neighbors and their fyrd was led by an ealdorman called Æthelwulf.

  Was it my uncle? There were many men called Æthelwulf, but how many were ealdormen in Mercia? I admit I felt strange when I heard the name, and I thought of the mother I had never met. In my mind she was the woman who was ever kind, ever gentle, ever loving, and I thought she must be watching me from somewhere, heaven or Asgard or wherever our souls go in the long darkness, and I knew she would hate that I was with the army that marched against her brother, and so that night I was in a black mood.

  But so was the Great Army for my uncle, if Æthelwulf was indeed my uncle, had trounced the two earls. Their foraging party had walked into an ambush and the men of Berrocscire had killed twenty-one Danes and taken another eight prisoner. The Englishmen had lost a few men themselves, and yielded one prisoner, but they had gained the victory, and it made no difference that the Danes had been outnumbered. The Danes expected to win, and instead they had been chased home without the food we needed. They felt shamed and a shudder went through the army because they did not think mere Englishmen could beat them.

  We were not starving yet, but the horses were desperately short of hay, which, anyway
, was not the best food for them, but we had no oats and so forage parties simply cut whatever winter grass we could find beyond our growing wall and the day after Æthelwulf’s victory Rorik, Brida, and I were in one of those groups, slashing at grass with long knives and stuffing sacks with the poor feed, when the army of Wessex came.

  They must have been encouraged by Æthelwulf’s victory, for now the whole enemy army attacked Readingum. The first I knew of it was the sound of screaming from farther west, then I saw horsemen galloping among our forage parties, hacking down with swords or skewering men with spears, and the three of us just ran, and I heard the hooves behind and snatched a look and saw a man riding at us with a spear and knew one of us must die and I took Brida’s hand to drag her out of his path and just then an arrow shot from Readingum’s wall slapped into the horseman’s face and he twisted away, blood pouring from his cheek, and meanwhile panicking men were piling around the two central bridges and the West Saxon horsemen, seeing it, galloped toward them. The three of us half waded and half swam the ditch, and two men hauled us, wet, muddy, and shivering, up across the wall.

  It was chaos outside now. The foragers crowding at the ditch’s far side were being hacked down, and then the Wessex infantry appeared, band after band of them emerging from the far woods to fill the fields. I ran back to the house where Ragnar was lodging and found Serpent-Breath beneath the cloaks where I hid her, and I strapped her on and ran out to find Ragnar. He had gone north, to the bridge close beside the Temes, and Brida and I caught up with his men there. “You shouldn’t come,” I told Brida. “Stay with Rorik.” Rorik was younger than us and, after getting soaked in the ditch, he had started shivering and feeling sick and I had made him stay behind.

  Brida ignored me. She had equipped herself with a spear and looked excited, though nothing was happening yet. Ragnar was staring over the wall, and more men were assembling at the gate, but Ragnar did not open it to cross the bridge. He did glance back to see how many men he had. “Shields!” he shouted for in their haste some men had come with nothing but swords or axes, and those men now ran to fetch their shields. I had no shield, but nor was I supposed to be there and Ragnar did not see me.